I trimmed my finger nails this week, partly in honour of Shridhar Chillal from Pune in India. He has just chopped off the nails on his left hand, I read this week.

What is so noteworthy about so mundane a piece of personal grooming, I hear you ask?

Well, Chillal held the World Record for the longest nails, having let them grow, unmanicured, for 68 years. His thumbnail was around 6.5 feet in length and the combined length of all the nails on his left hand was 909.6 centimetres or just over 29 feet 10 inches, in old money.

Chillal married, fathered two children and worked as a professional photographer. Perhaps the length of his nails was useful in getting those tricky close-up shots.

But there was one drawback to his strange predilection – Chillal cannot open his left hand from a closed position or flex his fingers. Oh well!